Although known primarily as a landscape painter, Kosa was also interested in the human figure. When in the early 1940s his wife became ill and he stayed home to nurse her, he turned to studio subjects such as the nude. By the 1940s the battle over the morality of the nude in art had been won in Los Angeles as visiting artists from the East who came to teach in Southern California, such as HENRY LEE McFEE and Alexander Brook (1898-1980), exhibited their nudes.
Kosa painted nudes in a more academic manner than he did landscapes. Seated Nude is painted fairly thinly, the figure tightly drawn and fully modeled in delicate transitional shades from light to dark. Kosa presented the partially clothed woman in a traditional manner, with a lavender-tinted fabric draping her thighs and curtains framing her as she sits on a green upholstered stool, with only the handbag on the floor dating the image to the 1940s. The woman’s midriff and legs are delicately highlighted, her head and shoulders cast in shadow, and her gaze is directed away from the viewer. In the winter of 1941 Kosa exhibited a variation of this painting, A Study (unlocated, reproduced in Art Digest 16 March 1, 19421: 12), in which the model is seen more from the side, with her head completely in shadow. In the museum’s painting Kosa glorified the woman by carefully painting her soft, pearly skin. He rendered the background objects with an equal sensitivity to texture. Seated Nude is somewhat startling in its frank sensuality. Seated Nude and A Study number among Kosa’s few paintings of the nude; his other renderings seem to have been only partial figures.